Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

[telophase]

Read as an ARC from NetGalley. Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Dr. Randy Frost and Dr. Gail Steketee is a popular science book about the phenomenon of hoarding, the people who hoard, why they do so, and how they can be helped.

Hoarding is a complex disorder, with many different etiologies. Some people may be surrounding themselves with stuff to wall off past trauma, or be addicted to the thrill of shopping, or (the closest to my heart) have attentional problems like ADHD that render them unable to focus long enough to clear any substantial area, among other causes. The two authors, a professor of psychology (Frost) and a dean of the School of Social Work at Boston U (Steketee), have been working with hoarders for years, and have deep insights into this behavior and treatments for it. Something they agree on is that forced cleanouts don't work - they don't treat the psychological problems that lead to hoarding behavior, and they are traumatic, in fact the suicide rate for hoarders who have been subject to forced cleanouts is quite high.

The authors examine the different types of hoarding and problems that lead to it, illustrated by case studies of hoarders they've worked with. There's also a chapter on children who exhibit hoarding behavior: sometimes this problem starts earlier than we think. They also point out that often the problem is an inordinate attachment to objects, such that it's painful to even think of throwing them out.

More than anything, hoarding represents a paradox of opportunity. Hoarders are gifted with the ability to see the opportunities in so many things. They are equally cursed with the inability to let go of any of these possibilities, thereby ensuring that few of the imagined options can ever be realized.

I read this book some time ago, and getting around to writing this review has been quite hard, in part because I have hoarding tendencies myself. They're mostly along the ADHD lines, in that I can't maintain my attention on a task such as decluttering or clearing an area long enough to get anything useful done, and if I let it go long enough, the work necessary to clean up an area is too overwhelming to start. I've found coping strategies in recent years - listening to podcasts while I clean is a big one, because I want to keep listening to this show, but I can't sit there and do nothing while listening, and I can't do anything that takes away from listening to it, like reading or messing about on the computer okay I can play Bejeweled while listening to podcasts, so cleaning is it. I've also discovered that watching shows like A&E's Hoarders flips a switch somewhere in my head such that I have to prove that I am NOT ONE OF THEM after I see an episode and go on a cleaning spree. (There are currently 7 episodes lined up on the DVR for precisely this reason.)

I do recommend the book for anyone who knows someone with the problem (and there are far more of them out there than you think!), who thinks they have it themselves, or who's interested in the psychology and pathology of material culture. I'd also recommend reading it in concert with Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things, an ethnography of people's relationships to their possessions, and Sam Gosling's Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, a book about how people describe and define themselves with their possessions.

I'd also like to point out something very interesting and, I think, important from Miller's book. His study involved doing an ethnography of material culture for every resident on a randomly picked street somewhere in the U.K., and he discovered something that flies against Received Wisdom in our culture. Right now, there's a cry to simplify! to strip down to essentials! to declutter! and get rid of Stuff! However, the resident on the street Miller studies who had the least number of connections to other people, and who seems to be living an emotionally deprived, aimless life is the one who has the least amount of possessions. The household with the most number of possessions is a family who are gregarious, larger, and constantly entertaining and open to new people and experiences. In both cases, the possessions they own (or don't own) are symbolic of their connections to others, and in both cases, of their amount of satisfaction in life.

The lesson I find in this is: it's not how much Stuff you do or don't have, it's what your relationship to the Stuff is. Stuff the book is about what happens when that relationship becomes a dysfunctional, abusive one.

Comments

[green_knight]

I'll check the book out when I have time. (It is, alas, no coincidence for me to have a decluttering icon.)

There's a fine line between a rich, fulfilled life with plenty of things you love, use, or need, and one that's cluttered and smothering you.

It's easy to be tidy if you have plenty of cupboard space, particularly plenty of pretty containers. The same things that are perfectly unremarkable in a three-bedroom house with walk-in cupboards and nice furniture, a basement and a garage would be a nightmare in a studio flat with open shelving - but not all of us can afford the space to spread things out and the money to put it into nice and appropriate receptacles. Part of my 'conceptual kitchen' is in my living room because my kitchen has no space at all.

There is a fair amount of advice out there on how to radically get rid of stuff, but a lot less on how to organise - mentally and physically - the things you love, and how to distinguish between things that you keep for a perfectly good reason (sentimentality _is_ good, IMHO) and those you keep out of a sense of duty, or because you're afraid you'll run out of supplies, or things that you have outgrown etc.

In that respect I suppose that clutter is no different from food or any other issue in our society: all too many people are measured against unhealthy ideals and fail.

[telophase]

I think there's also a difference between cluttered and smothering you, and pathologically disabling.

[green_knight]

And just to make things more complicated, the same person can have various levels of clutter and different issues, all at the same time. Of course, when you're overwhelmed, it's harder to learn from your strengths.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

That...makes a fair amount of sense. In retrospect, the only time I have maintained my apartment with any sense of order and cleanliness was during the time when I was on Concerta.

I've been concerned about whether or not I actually have hoarding tendencies, and always thought it was related to depression. Now I'm starting to wonder if maybe I shouldn't think about going back to a psychiatrist and seriously discuss ADHD.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

That makes sense. I know that the years since I've been on Strattera are the years when I've been able to make use of podcasts and watching shows about hoarders to jump-start myself, and I'm not sure they'd have worked previously.

Right now I'm living with myrialux, who seems to be a compulsive putter-away-of-things and washer-of-dishes (although not a compulsive duster-of-surfaces), so that helps squelch my tendencies also. And before this, I was able to keep myself from tilting that last little bit over into compulsive hoardership, although if I developed health or mobility problems, or another severe depressive episode like the one I had after my father's death, I think it might be enough to make me fall over the line.

It's a frightening thought that I can look at a hoarder's house and think "There but for the grace of God go I."

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

When I lived with ssartain, we were what I like to think of as 'conventionally messy'. Sometimes, we'd let the apartment go a bit, but come the weekend we'd recover. On the whole, it was pretty clean. Apart from the bottom of my closet, the apartment was neat in general and I made a special effort to keep things in order when he would go away on assignment.

Apart from that brief period when I thought I was being over-medicated, my apartment has been...a scooch away from being ready for an A&E camera crew. I'm not quite as bad as a 'true hoarder' but with all the attention focused on hoarding lately I worry pretty much every day that that's where I'm headed.

I do have periods when I'm better and ones where I'm worse. Some of them coincide with depressive periods, some of them don't. Often, work is a huge factor, as is my health.

Right now, treatment or not, I'm thinking that I am going to set a goal of having the apartment clean by the end of the summer. I will not set myself up to fail by setting aside entire days and weekends to clean, but only do work in stretches of 15-90 minutes and once the Deed Is Done, my goal is to be able to maintain it by bringing in a cleaning person.

Yes, I am only one person on a modest salary. I am, however, one person who has consistently proven that she will not scrub her toilet or vacuum her carpets and it's probably a better use of my disposable income than Yet Another volume of manga.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

One of the people on my f-list has been having good luck in decluttering over the past few months by picking one area at a time - one closet, one item of storage furniture, or even one cabinet - and working on that location and that location only, and keeping, selling, or trashing items in it.

I mentioned that to myrialux, and he thought it was a good idea, so we may utilize that to get rid of the excess kitchen equipment we have - combining households produced lots and lots of excess crap that neither of us uses, and many duplicates of the things we do use.

I think one day I'll break down and get someone to come in every couple of weeks to clean. We manage to keep the place about 80% clutter-free, and the kitchen gets cleaned every couple of days, and the Roomba gets around, but we're both not very good at dusting or cleaning toilets or surfaces. It would be well worth it for someone else to do it.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Dusting with one of those microfiber "feather" dusters (AKA "cat on a stick") is a podcast- and TV-catchup-friendly activity. I think they work better if you shake them out first so they have a bit of electrostatic charge.

On the bathroom, if you don't force yourself to deep-clean it every time, and just keep some rags, paper towels, a sponge, or whatever you like using, and the 409 under the sink, to give a quick spray-and-wipe, it's not as grotty a chore as it seems. 99% of bathroom cleaning can be solved in 15 seconds with a 409 spritz and a paper towel. It's the idea that the whole thing has to be done at once that makes one miserable.

I don't use those shower sprays but my mother does, and I have to admit that they do appear to work well. You do need to start with a clean setup, meaning, spray the tile walls and tub with scrubbing bubbles in a normal cleaning, but once you start with the spray, keeping up is pretty easy. I was surprised that this stuff works, but it does! Caveat: I honestly don't know anything about the intersection of "cats who like the bathtub" and "these EZ cleaning products".

If you have hobbies, you never beat the clutter. My brothers' houses are fairly neat and neither they nor their kids ever have hobbies, projects, fandoms, or anything of the sort going on. (Sports seems to be it and the sports stuff is in the garage.) So in that way, too much tidy is a bad sign.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've got something similar to that duster, which I do wield occasionally, although Toby just doesn't. Despite him complaining about his allergies all the time. XD

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Guys don't get housework. Also, dirt-blind. Also, the idea of doing housework whether or not you "think" it needs to be done is alien to most. Getting the dust out and vacuuming the upholstery makes a huge, vast difference to how bad my allergies are!

I like the microfiber feather duster thing because it does a good job on the tops of books: it squooshes quite small and you can poke it in and out of full shelves. The real feather feather dusters, or rags, do not do that.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Toby's more of a housekeeper than I am! He explained his problem with dusting is that you have to pick stuff up, dust, then put the stuff back down again, and it drives his OCD tendencies nuts.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

That's the rag method, more or less. The microfiber feather duster allows you to flick and brush the duster around and over things (gently) without handling them. It sounds twee and ineffective, but it works (I do suspect that shaking the duster to get its electrostatic charge going helps).

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

I think everyone has that reaction to Hoarders. After seeing the worst of the worst, you have to prove to yourself that you aren't as bad as /them./

I'll admit to owning a lot of stuff that I don't care much about. Honestly, save for the contents of the safe and maybe a carload of other stuff, my house could be completely destroyed and I wouldn't be horribly upset at the loss. None of it is really junk, though. It's stuff that's worth selling, but the hurdles to doing so are greater than those of keeping it neat and orderly.

[awamiba.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review. Those look like very interesting books. I was one of those children that hoarded things and always had a very messy room. I'm not the neatest person in the world still, and a lot of that is effort related. I only have so much energy in the day and interacting with people is higher on my list than cleaning up my things. Also, my concentration and focus have both gone down the drain. I've been told that that is RA/RA drug related, so I'll need to talk to the doctor about that. *sigh*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I always had a messy room, too, and lots of things left around in half-finished states because I lose the oomph to do them partway through, and that leads to other mess as things dependent on the half-finished thing pile up. Case in point: the counter in the hall bathroom was littered with empty cold medication boxes, other trash, and cleaning products because the trash can was in the hall, because I'd moved it there when I was scrubbing the grout in the bathroom floor tiles and had to quit because my power scrubber ran out of power. And then never quite got around to either scrubbing some more, or moving the trash can back into the bathroom. (Toby never moved it back because he thought I had it outside because I wanted it there!) But once his parents were due to come in, I moved the trash can back, threw the boxes and stuff away, and hid the cleaning products under the sink. That would never have gotten done without that outside action making it happen.

*sigh*

[chisotahn]

I totally have the ADHD problem. The solution was for my best friend to spent two days helping me clean, both by pitching in and by sitting on my bed making faces at me. It's much easier for me to focus on hated tasks when I have friendly reinforcement like that!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've enlisted others to help me on occasion, but it hasn't worked out too well because I haven't found the right person to help me work and not distract me. XD It works when living with Toby because he'll just start cleaning something without saying anything, and then I feel guilty and go pick up a few items, but not much else.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

I'm a packrat. Part of it comes from a long history of finding a use for something a week after I threw it out. Some stuff, like some boxes of my comic books, I'd sell if the effort would be rewarded well enough in money. My dad's trying to sell some of his on eBay and it's so not worth it.

But I actually still have all three of my prior, no longer completely functional laptops in my possession. I can't let go of them because they mean too much and I couldn't see throwing them into the trash or, these days, handing them over to Best Buy or whomever to dismantle. I cried when my first car was towed away for the last time to a charity.

I have a tiny bedroom, which makes it impossible to find a nice place to put and/or hide everything. At least my piles of stuff are fairly neat. A lot of my clutter is government and health paperwork I actually can't throw out, so I need an adminstrative assistant's help more than a maid's. A lot more energy would be nice too.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Packrat here, too. I don't have as much necessary paperwork as you do, but I've found the only thing that works for me is to toss it all into a box labeled "To File Later"* and shove it on a shelf. My boyfriend, on the other hand, has about eight different boxes with files in them and files everything, including manuals from stuff he buys. It boggles me.

I don't have a huge emotional attachment to a lot of things, but there's a core of stuff that I don't want or need but I can't get rid of.



* It has to be labeled that. That's important. It won't be filed later, but that's beside the point.

[viridian5.livejournal.com]

My surgery- and disability-related papers are in a box and a large envelope. I have a box and a big folder that I keep most of my SS, Medicaid, and Medicare stuff in. The kind of above paperwork that I still have to work on, like this year's Medicaid/Medicare renewal that I have to fill out and get an award/proof of income letter for, I have out to remind me it needs to be done. Bills that need to be paid have their own space.

I also have piles of mail I'm not sure what to do with. *g* I do a purge of those once in a while. I also have piles of receipts and things and instruction booklets for whatever tech I still have.

My non-paperwork packratery comes from remembering who gave me a lot of the things I own. That's the plush cat my college roommate gave me, that's the DVD from Person X, etc. Mementos. I've spent so much time writing, working on photos, talking to people and surfing online with my various computers that they come to mean a lot to me.